Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Armed with a computer model in 1935, one could probably have written the exact same story on California drought as appears today in the Washington Post some 80 years ago, prompted by the very similar outlier temperatures of 1934 and 2014.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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President Barack Obama on Thursday issued 13 pardons and commuted the sentences of eight individuals.

The commuted sentences involved men and women serving long terms on drug charges, including several sentenced to life without parole.

“Each of them has served more than 15 years in prison,” Obama noted. “In several cases, the sentencing judges expressed frustration that the law at the time did not allow them to issue punishments that more appropriately fit the crime” …

Another prisoner whose sentence Obama commuted, Clarence Aaron of Mobile, Ala., was sentenced to life without parole in 1993 following his conviction on cocaine charges. Aaron has been a “model prisoner (who) has taken courses in religious studies, economics, Spanish, photography and behavioral development,” according to Families Against Mandatory Minimums.

Obama’s actions here are welcome news to the prisoners and their families, but, from a big picture perspective, the president’s actions are stingy and long overdue. For additional background, go here and here. The Pardon Power blog has more details.

As prospects of a U.S.-led military intervention in Syria hang in limbo, the foreign exchange black market for the Syrian pound (SYP) has become increasingly volatile. In countries with troubled currencies, such as Syria, black-market exchange rates provide a reliable gauge of economic expectations. Judging by the erratic performance of the black-market Syrian pound/U.S. dollar (USD) exchange rate, the Syrian people’s expectations have been on quite the roller coaster ride, as the U.S. Congress prepares for what will likely be a very close vote on a Use of Force resolution.

Following Secretary of State John Kerry’s initial call for military intervention in Syria, on August 26th, the SYP experienced a one-day drop of 24%—reflecting Syrians’ heightened fears of U.S. military conflict.

On August 29th, two events occurred that reversed this slide. In Damascus, the Syrian government renewed its attempts to crack down on black-market currency trading. And, over 4,000 miles away in London, the British Parliament voted down a motion authorizing military action in Syria. In consequence, the SYP rebounded by a whopping 26% over the course of two days.

The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s consideration of a use of force resolution seems to have once again raised Syrians’ expectations of a U.S. military strike, as it set the SYP on another slide. Since September 3rd, the pound has lost 10% of its value.

For some perspective on how the West’s march to war has affected Syria’s currency, and ultimately inflation, let’s take a look at how things have changed over the course of the past month: On August 6th, the black-market SYP/USD exchange rate was 205, yielding an implied annual inflation rate of 191%. As of September 6th, the black-market SYP/USD exchange rate sits at 250, yielding an implied annual inflation rate for Syria of 257%.

In this new paper, I argue that an overly burdensome U.S. regulatory state is partly responsible for the downward trend in domestic and foreign investment in U.S. factories, professional services operations, distribution centers, and research and development facilities. EPA mandates, Obamacare’s costly, complicated new health care directives, and the slowly emerging financial services restrictions stemming from Dodd Frank, are just some of the new regulations that have thickened the Federal Registerto more than 80,000 pages per year and added 16,500 new pages to the Code of Federal Regulations during the Obama presidency, undoubtedly deflecting and chasing investment and business creation to foreign shores.

Oddly, this massive expansion of federal rules has evolved as President Obama has simultaneously expressed concerns about the impacts of both declining investment and regulatory overkill on economic growth. In 2011, the president issued Executive Order 13563 under the heading “Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review.” Section 1 states:

Our regulatory system must protect public health, welfare, safety, and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness and job creation. It must be based on the best available science. It must allow for public participation and an open exchange of ideas. It must promote predictability and reduce uncertainty. It must identify and use the best, most innovative, and least burdensome tools for achieving regulatory ends. It must take into account benefits and costs, both quantitative and qualitative. It must ensure that regulations are accessible, consistent, written in plain language, and easy to understand. It must measure, and seek to improve, the actual results of regulatory requirements.

The president issued this EO in the wake of his party’s mid-term election rebuke, perhaps to indicate that he understood the concerns of business. He even required that his agencies formulate plans for undertaking systematic, retrospective reviews of their rules and regulations with an eye toward making them less imposing on society:

Sec. 6. Retrospective Analyses of Existing Rules. (a) To facilitate the periodic review of existing significant regulations, agencies shall consider how best to promote retrospective analysis for rules that may be outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome, and to modify, streamline, expand, or repeal them in accordance with what has been learned…

In the words of a former chief economist at the Council of Economic Advisers:

The single greatest problem with the current system is that most regulations are subject to a cost-benefit analysis only in advance of their implementation. That is the point when the least is known and any analysis must rest on many unverifiable and potentially controversial assumptions.

Superabundant federal student aid has done a huge amount to get us into our bankrupting college mess. To get us out, today President Obama will propose, essentially, “soft” price controls. But they will likely leave the root problem intact while, if anything, adding new kinds of woe.

On his college bus tour, President Obama will propose that Washington start publishing ratings of schools based on such measures as average tuition, graduation rates, debt and earnings of graduates, and the percentage of a college’s students who are low-income. The ratings would also “compare colleges with similar missions.” Ultimately, the president will propose that the availability of aid be partly conditioned on the new ratings.

Let’s be clear: The price of college is almost certainly far higher than it should be, fueled largely by federal aid that essentially tells colleges “charge whatever you want – we’ll give students the money.” That’s a major reason that average, inflation-adjusted prices have more than doubled in the last 30 years. And it is good that the president, and many others, are essentially acknowledging the inflationary reality of aid. But will price controls help or hurt?

…he didn’t say anything new or different. His audience was treated to the same tax-spend-and-regulate boilerplate that the President has been dispensing ever since he entered political life. …with Obamanomics, not only has America failed to enjoy the traditional period of four-to-five percent growth at the start of a recovery, the economy hasn’t even gotten close to the long-run average of 3 percent. That’s a damning indictment. But it gets worse. The data on employment is downright depressing. A look at the numbers reveals that the nation is suffering from the worst period of job creation since the Great Depression. Most startling, we still haven’t recovered the jobs we lost during the recession.

That’s some strong rhetoric, but there are plenty of numbers to back up my assertions.

Let’s take a look at the interactive website maintained by the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. This site allows users to compare all business cycles since World War II.

Let’s start by comparing the current business cycle to what happened under Reaganomics.

As you can see, we’ve had a very sluggish recovery compared to the boom we enjoyed in the 1980s.

Not all of this is Obama’s fault, by the way. Here’s some more of what I wrote for the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

…all of these problems started before President Obama ever got to the White House. President Bush also was guilty of too much spending and excessive regulation, and his policies helped push the economy into a ditch. Unfortunately, even though he promised “change,” President Obama has been adding to Bush’s mistakes — and also raising taxes.

Some people may be wondering whether it’s fair to compare Reaganomics to Obamanomics. Maybe I’m cherry-picking data to make Obama (and Bush) look bad.

Encouraging as this must be for supporters of a larger federal role in early education, opinion polling is not a good way to design policy—any more than it is a good way to design bridges. There is an aspect of bridge construction in which public opinion does properly figure: assessing demand. But when it comes to actually designing the structure that will carry living, breathing people across a gorge, public opinion plays little role. The reason is obvious: most people lack the time, skills, and knowledge to design bridges. They know what they ultimately want out of civil engineering projects, but they don’t know how best to achieve their goals.

Because of that fact, this is precisely not the sort of policy that should be expensively promoted at the federal level. If states wish to gamble that they can succeed where others have failed, then their residents should be the ones who put their money on the line. That approach has the merit that state politicians can be more easily held accountable than federal ones—voters have fewer issues on which to decide whom to support or oppose at the state level.

Well-meaning as the First Five Years Fund and its philanthropic backers no doubt are, their effort to design policy based on public opinion polling is badly misguided. It is little better than a schoolyard taunt that “everyone else wants to do it.” Serious people, people who actually want to achieve their stated goals and not simply win a political contest, can do better.

Michael Froman, a longtime White House economic aide nominated to be President Obama’s trade representative, has nearly half a million dollars in a fund based in the Cayman Islands, according to financial documents provided to the Senate Finance Committee. …White House officials said Mr. Froman played no role in creating, managing or operating the investment funds and had done nothing wrong. “Mike Froman has paid every penny of his taxes and reported all of the income, gains and losses from the investment on his tax returns,” Mr. Whithorne said.